Examining the impact of financial statements readability on payout policy and the moderating role of ownership concentration | ||
| مجلة البحوث المحاسبية | ||
| Volume 12, Issue 3, September 2025, Pages 312-339 PDF (650 K) | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/abj.2025.454090 | ||
| Authors | ||
| Mohamed Ibrahim Salem1; Ahmed Abdelaty M. Elsharkawy2 | ||
| 1Department of Accounting, Faculty of Commerce, Suez University | ||
| 2Department of Accounting, Faculty of Business, Ain Shams University | ||
| Abstract | ||
| This paper seeks to examine the impact of financial statements readability (FSR) on payout policy (PoP); furthermore, it explores the moderating effect of ownership concentration (OC) on this association. Findings showed contradictory results that deliver an argument about whether the readability of the financial statements delivers higher or lower payouts. The hypotheses are empirically assessed using a research sample of 558 observations of non-financial firms publicly traded on the Egyptian Exchange (EGX) across the years 2014 to 2022. Moreover, file size is used as a measure for the financial statements’ readability after converting from PDF into plain text, and cash dividend per share over earnings per share is used for measuring payout policy. The attained result of this study shows a positive, though statistically non-significant, impact of FSR on PoP. Nevertheless, OC significantly moderated the impact of FSR on PoP, thus strengthening the positive direction. Considering that the current paper is among the earliest research papers to consider the moderating influence of OC on the FSR-PoP association in emerging markets, it affords several suggestions for several stakeholders in Egypt and other developing markets, emphasizing OC’s key role in enhancing dividend quality in the Egyptian market. Furthermore, the present study aids the expansion of knowledge in the prior research on the impact of FSR on PoP, offering fresh insights on the influence of OC as most within the present state of knowledge has mainly concentrated on the impact of FSR on PoP, making this research bridge the gap within existing studies | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Financial statements readability; payout policy; Ownership concentration; Egypt | ||
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